Orugos's art thread- pretty hiatus-y for now sorry!

Hi everyone! I was looking for a way to get involved with the Smogon community, and this seems like the way for me to do it :> I'm an old fart who's been a fan of pokemon for a long time, but lately I've been pretty burnt out with art in general, and I'm looking for some ideas to spark inspiration, so I would love to hear some ideas that I could try to execute. Thanks in advance!

Here's some pokemon art I've done in the past, though for the most part these are relatively recent. Starters below and sandshrew in PS, nidoking in sai+PS, and the older starters at the bottom in pchat.

a cute sandshrew:

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Gen 1 starters and evos, done in PS:

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Gen 1 starters in pchat:

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It's not that I love the gen1 starters this much, I've just tried 10,000 times to draw all of gen1 and I always stop at caterpie because it's boring. > <

Nidoking is my favorite! done in SAI:

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Okay! a pretty typical ghost themed concept of with dusknoir at alchemator's suggestion, phasing through a wall is what Im working on, and since swaggersaurus asked for process and I don't normally save progress shots b/c im lazy, I thought I would for this :0

It's just a very messy prelim sketch right now. The canvas size is about 6500x5000px
I wanted to make it aggressive, because dusknoir is pretty intimidating. I also want to keep in mind that initially, alchemator suggested dusknoir in a comparison to the swirly stylization I did shown earlier, so I got the idea to do something kind of like this but with longer lines like more squarish/rectangularish swirls to compliment some of dusknoir's long lines.

Some of my concerns are:
-his left hand is too fruity pinky-out drinking tea; gonna try to fix by rendering the fingers closer and turning the arm more down. I wanted him to be pulling himself through the wall.
-his collar/head area Im not really happy with, they're kind of flat and not really cylindrical. this will be fixed by forcing the roughly eyeballed perspective further by pushing the curves that make his head to be more round.

edit: also I should have noted in the original post that I work pretty slowly, but the point of trying requests was for me to push speed and faster development, and to exercise some dedication with ideas that I might not originally be interested in, in interest of taking commissions. I'll try to get to everyone as quickly as possible. :>

A little over an hour in, and this is where I'm at. After I fixed the left hand, the positioning worked out, so I didn't move it. I fixed everything else and tightened up the quality, and right now I'm not sure if I want to deviate from the above examples of my work and keep it messy like it is, because I like how dramatic it is now, or if I want to make it clean like normal. I also felt like every part of the drawing was vertically squished, so I just stretched it taller and it worked well. :> I'm not very happy with how static it is, but since I'm doing this as quickly as I can, I think I can forgive myself. I think if I were to do a better version I would have the viewer below and to the right of him at a kind of pseudo 3 plane perspective view, with him glaring in that direction.

whilst it would be great to see you get stage-by-stage to the results in your op, i agree with you - the messy, rough and high-contrast direction it is taking at the moment looks great and i think would be really interesting to explore!

I took an hour break to pick up my roommate, and then I worked for a little less than an hour, so here's progress shots for up to 2 hours into the process :>

Here, I created a layer on top of my lines and set it to overlay. Then I laid down some tints on the lines. At the stage I'm at now, these tints are really dark and I'm going to brighten them up and make them more apparent, it'll create a really good flow throughout the image when it's done. Also I forgot to mention before that during sketching and still now I've been flipping the image horizontally to make sure everything looks correct. Flipping your image makes symmetry flaws much much more apparent and I recommend that everyone should!

I laid down the basic colors I wanted; I knew I didnt want to pick purple because that was too obvious, so I opted for red for aggression. I picked a blue to compliment for shadows, and then I wanted to add a flashlight kind of light, so I just marked where that would be with a giant yellow circle.

From there I just built up colors, and it was pretty easy to work with such a harsh light source. I want to keep in mind to make the red reflect in the shadows of the figure a bit more as I continue, but I'm kind of worried that it's going to dull down the vibrancy, so we'll see what happens..

3.5 hours, though a chunk of the past 1.5 hours was bsing and watching a movie, but this is honestly the boring part! its just fine tuning rendering until its done, adding more and more detail until I'm happy with it :> I'll post another shot when the figure is done, then the final image.

anddddd thats as far as Im getting tonight. I lost track of time, because we ended up ordering a pizza.....but yeah! just more rendering, its getting way too clean, I think I liked how it was before :/ but its easier to go dirty, so, i can make a mess of it tomorrow!

Also, I keep forgetting to thank everyone for your kind words! I have such a trigger finger for forum posts, and I keep getting really absorbed in this drawing @__@ but I really appreciate them and you're all very flattering >3<

Wow, your art is just fantastic. I will post more about what I like about it tomorrow, since I'm going to sleep. Ummm, would you please draw a Shaymin Land Forme? :3 I think it would look good in your style, but if that's too hard, I'd love to see a Jumpluff ;D What program do you draw in by the way? (Always interests me, and surely other artists.) Thank you for considering my request!

P.S. Welcome to Smogon, and kudos on being proactive in getting involved in the community :)

@mentlegen&jumpluff: I use a intuos3 tablet and for this dusknoir I'm using PS; I tend to use a mix of PS, sai, and more rarely, shi-painter/pchat.

I have to put dusknoir on hold this morning to work on convention art ;0; NOT TO PLUG MYSELF OR ANYTHING but I'll be at AFO in Orlando,FL at AA and it'll be my first serious attempt at selling so I'm really excited!

alsoooo adding a queue/list in the first post so I can keep track of people's ideas :>!

okay. here's where the image gains a solid direction, I think. Before I was teetering between ideas but now I think it's at a place that its just smooth sailing from here on out. I just wanted to note where that change occured.

How it got here is a little different, I wanted to make some of the ripple areas darker so I made a new layer on top to airbrush them in because I wanted to easily be able to clean up edges. Then I just ended up going nuts and adding a ton of dark areas and voila :> Still needs some cleaning around the inside edges of the figure, but the next shot should be the last one.